As far as the news media and most of the American people are concerned, the sexual relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky has come, seen, conquered, overstayed its welcome, overstayed its welcome some more, and finally sunk into a well-deserved oblivion, deep below the surface of public consciousness. What we once seemed unable to ignore, even for a day, we now are most unwilling to remember. Were the impeachment hearings (or, for that matter, the bombing of Baghdad, the war in Vietnam) anything more than a strange dream?
It seems to be in the nature of hot button news stories -- particularly those with sexual themes or implications -- that they engulf the national consciousness for a period of time, only to then disappear from public attention so completely that it would be easy to believe they had no ongoing significance or impact. There is something profoundly ahistorical about the American view of the world, an overwhelming desire to separate the present from the inertial weight of the past, to live in the moment without being bound by the habits and obligations of thousands of years of custom and tradition. We are categorically different from most Europeans, who love their connection to the past, in this way. Disregarding the past is the basis of our delightful national spontaneity, but it also leads us to move blindly from one social cataclysm to the next, to make the same mistakes over and over again. Fortunately or unfortunately, the present cannot be completely divorced from the past. What has happened before continues to affect what is occurring now, and affects what will happen in the future, whether we choose to acknowledge that or not.
As urgently as we may want to turn our attention away from images of Monica Lewinsky on her knees in the hallway of the Oval Office, it is worth considering, at least for a moment, the ongoing consequences of this national erotic caper with regard to both broad-based sexual culture and, more specifically, to the role sex plays in national politics. As convenient as it would be to treat the Clinton-Lewinsky episode as a kind of national psychotic break and just hope that nothing like it will never happen again -- it has nevertheless changed the national sexual landscape in important ways that are going to be with us for a long time.
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Bringing Sex into Normal Daily Discourse
Perhaps the most fundamental lasting effect of the Clinton-Lewinsky mania is the way it has unwittingly brought sex to the dinner table and generally expanded the realm of what is considered proper public discourse about sexual matters. We have seen grandfatherly Mike Wallace talk seriously about "pussy" with ex-Presidential Counsel Lloyd Cutler and news commentator Sally Quinn on one of television's most respected and dignified news shows, and been told by Cutler that it is as normal for the President to "talk pussy" with his friend, Vernon Jordan, as it would be for anyone else. We have seen terms like penis, semen, and oral sex repeated so routinely in both television and print media news reports that they have become thoroughly normalized in the national consciousness. We have watched the President of the United States explain matter-of-factly and without apparent embarrassment under oath that, while he was seeing Monica Lewinsky, he behaved very much like most people behave when they have extra-marital affairs -- keeping his activities as private as possible, lying when necessary to maintain discretion. We have listened as revered political analysts discuss the nuances of just what kind of discretion is appropriate when a president is having an affair, sounding for all the world just like characters talking about their friends over cocktails in a Woody Allen film.
It is, in one sense, a sex educator's dream: more information about sex distributed to a broader audience than millions of dollars of Federal programs could ever hope to achieve. If Ted Koppel can talk about the President's penis, then no little boy in America need internalize the discomfort of referring to his sex organ a "wee-wee." Despite the largely successful efforts of the Christian right to remove pleasure-affirming sex education from school curricula, every six-year-old in America now knows that oral sex, despite being entirely unrelated to reproduction, is something that lots of people -- including important people like the President of the United States -- do and greatly enjoy. (The number of teenagers over the next ten years who react with shock and disgust when their boyfriends suggest they take their penises into their mouths, or their girlfriends ask them to lick their clitorises, is going to be a whole lot smaller than we've seen in the last ten years.) Although no one is yet ready to fully acknowledge or validate the extra-marital sexual reality that is the American statistical norm, in the wake of national microanalysis of the drama of Bill and Monica and Hillary and Chelsea, we can expect every man, woman, and child in America to be at least a little less shocked if and when the complexities of sex-on-the-side muddy the waters of their supposedly by-the-book marriages.
The boundaries of the territory sanctioned as common and familiar sexual behavior and discourse have been pushed outward one more time, and it doesn't matter whether Jerry Falwell, Henry Hyde, or even the mainstream majority of sex-protective American husbands, wives, and parents like it or not. This information and perspective will not disappear from public awareness, even if Monica Lewinsky does.
It is scorchingly ironic that such widespread sexual normalization comes at the hands of erotophobes like Kenneth Starr, but irony of this sort should no longer surprise us. It was, after all, the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, not radical sex education programs, that made anal sex and the importance of using condoms familiar topics for dinner conversation from coast to coast. And it was retrograde commercial pornography, more than the political tracts of feminist intellectuals, that taught reverence for the beauty of female genitals, and delight in performing oral sex on women, to mainstream heterosexual men.
This seems to be one of the most important ways that sexual information makes its way into American culture: through the back doors that accompany the various overwrought scandals, outrages, and social panics of the day. The Lord, as they say, works in strange ways.
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Sex, the Great Equalizer
The notion that a national leader is, or even should be, some kind of superhuman, larger-than-life, mythical godfigure has taken a serious hit from the Clinton-Lewinsky publicity, one that many political analysts are saying will prove fatal over time. Indeed, it is difficult to maintain the aura of a political leader as an heroic national figurehead when we are also confronted with the reality of him as a sexual human being. Sex, with its inevitable quirks and foibles, is just too powerful a democratizing aspect of life, too universally human a condition, to let us pretend that any sexual president (or general, or corporate CEO, or member of the clergy) is, in the end, anything more than another human being with all his/her very human strengths and weaknesses. Traditionally, we have tried to think of our leaders as gods -- as desexualized, all-knowing father figures -- in much the way that small children idealize their parents. Yet, at some point, every child must accept the reality that Mom and Dad are sexual beings, and then to somehow integrate the concept of Mom and Dad as needed protectors and authorities with the reality of Mom and Dad as plain old, imperfect, error-prone human beings, just like everyone else.
The same process of dethroning the warrior on the horse, the leader on the pedestal in the public square, helps us to be realistic in terms of what we can expect from even the most powerful of public figures. For better or for worse, national and world leaders are just as frail and flawed as everyone else -- perhaps even more so, given the peculiar personality traits required to do what has to be done to attain national positions of power and influence. In the end, it is our unrealistic expectations of political, economic, or spiritual leaders, more than their failure to live up to those expectations, that keep us from relating realistically and effectively with a complex and decidedly non-ideal world.
The spectacle of having the most explicit details of Bill Clinton's sexual desires, fantasies, and behaviors on public display week after week, month after month, has forced the nation to come to terms with its President as a man first, and a national leader second. And what could be more deflating to a cult of personal magnification than being forced to acknowledge that the President of the United States -- just like my dad, your mom, the Rabbi's daughter, George Bush, jr., Slobodan Milosevic, and (even) Madeleine Albright -- masturbates, has exotic fantasies and affairs, acts out forbidden desires in the dark of the night -- in addition to having interesting or boring sex, frequent or occasional sex, intimate or empty sex with his spouse -- just like you and I? This humbling of the Great Leader, mourned by traditionalists as undermining the very basis of national loyalty and respect, is in fact just the opposite -- the precondition for a culture of loyalty and respect based on real accomplishment and deeds rather than inflated cults of personality. What the nation needs is a genuine, human leader, not a manufactured figure of mythical proportion -- an effective, admirable human being, not a Wizard of Oz.
As the spotlight of sexual attention broadened from President Clinton to all members of Congress and the Republican National Committee, with the again ironic help of Hustler magazine editor Larry Flynt, it became clear that the real sexual lives (some would say "indiscretions") of political figures were now to be part of the fodder of future campaigns for political office. This calls either for a narrowing of the field of potential political candidates to a very small and unusual group of people, or the broadening of the concept of acceptable sexual behavior for political leaders far beyond what the national culture has been willing to embrace to date.
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The President as Object of Desire
The most widely acknowledged amazement of the Lewinsky affair is that Bill Clinton not only survived being so profoundly and sexually exposed, but also managed to turn the tables on his political opponents so dramatically that their attempts to indict his sexuality became their extreme political liability. The refusal of most Americans to spurn Clinton over his sexual behavior, indeed their expanding sympathy and appreciation of him as the victim of an overzealous antisexual attack, suggests that in the future the sexuality of a political leader may not only be less of a burden than in the past, but may actually be embraced as a positive political asset.
The sexual attractiveness of Bill Clinton to women voters was a well-publicized phenomenon during the 1992 presidential campaign. In interviews with news reporters, women acknowledged having sexual fantasies about Candidate Clinton to such an extent that this was considered a significant part of Clinton's electoral appeal. Although opinion polls consistently show that both women and men disapprove of Clinton being unfaithful to his wife, of deceiving his family and the public, and of his sexual involvement with a woman so much younger than himself, throughout the Lewinsky scandal, pollsters found that women, even more than men, were ready to "forgive" Clinton's sexual transgressions, and continued to support him politically. One has to wonder if some of this support stems from women's continued sexual fascination with an increasingly eroticized Clinton, even as pundits have hypothesized that men discreetly admire Clinton's ability to transgress sexual rules and not go down in flames, even when his transgressions have been brought to national attention.
Publication of the Starr report, the public broadcast of the videotape of Clinton's highly descriptive testimony before the Starr Grand Jury, the detailed description by Kathleen Willey of Clinton's alleged sexual harassment at the White House, all provided the American public with a degree of sexually explicit storytelling unprecedented in national news media outside the tabloid supermarket scandal sheets.
Again and again, tens of millions of Americans were made privy to the details of where and how often Clinton touched Lewinsky's bare breast with his hand and with his mouth, where and how often Lewinsky touched and sucked Clinton's penis, whether he was erect, whether he came, whether he attempted to also gratify Lewinsky with his hands, with his mouth, with his cigar. We heard of a vulnerable Clinton whose weak back required him to prop himself against the wall while Lewinsky took his penis into her mouth, of Lewinsky pleading with Clinton for the satisfaction of seeing him come. And, of course, there was the graphic image of Clinton's semen, triumphantly delivered after months of restraint, archivally preserved on Lewinsky's now-sacred blue dress, an image (and dress) which will be a prominent part of national folklore for decades.
In equally graphic detail, Willey testified about the strength of Clinton's desire for her ("I have wanted to do this since the first moment I saw you"), about how and where he allegedly fondled her, about how he took her hand and placed it on his penis, about how she could feel that his penis was definitely aroused.
Adding the dimension of emotional attachment to the raw sex of it all, we learned of Clinton's many romantic gifts to Lewinsky, even after the initial Starr revelations, of his concern for her well-being, of how they would laugh and talk affectionately together after being sexual, about how they enjoyed phone sex repeatedly late at night. In his Grand Jury testimony, Clinton was repentant about his poor judgment and his deception, but unapologetic and forthcoming with regard to his tender feelings for Lewinsky throughout the ordeal that was consuming them both. And in her much vaunted interview with Barbara Walters, Lewinsky was touchingly open about both her emotional attachment to Clinton and her delight in their sexual chemistry.
This is the stuff of which romance novels -- the best-selling fiction in America -- are made, and the stuff also of the popular genres of women-authored erotic fiction, and commercial pornography. All in all, thanks to the attempts by Kenneth Starr and the managers of the impeachment campaign in the House of Representatives to publicly embarrass Clinton, the entire public spectacle became a voyeur's delight, a shot in the national erotic arm, a source of daily titillation -- especially because it was set against the august background of the Oval Office, phone conversations with members of Congress, and the knowledge that it was events of international consequence, such as the war in Bosnia, that were transpiring while the President turned his attention to Lewinsky.
Given the surprising increase in public support for Clinton throughout the Lewinsky publicity, and the backlash against Republicans, both in the November 1998 elections and thereafter, it would not be surprising to see future political candidates embrace or even emphasize their sexual desirability as a significant element of their electoral appeal -- a complete turnaround from the past where candidates have done everything in their power to appear stoically unsexual. Of course, being sexually attractive has nothing to do with being an effective political leader, but then neither does sex appeal have anything to do with being a talented actor or musician, and yet the sexual allure of Hollywood and MTV celebrities is an unquestioned part of their popularity and public image.
Whether or not future political candidates complete for who can be the best sex symbol, after the Clinton-Lewinsky brouhaha we can expect the sexuality of political figures to be treated quite differently than it has been in the past. Strategically speaking, the lessons of Clinton's long war of wits and will with Kenneth Starr and the Radical Right seem to be (1) tell the truth is some non-standard aspect of your sexuality is exposed; (2) emphasize the consensual nature of any sexual encounters, however unconventional; (3) do not apologize for having a strong sex drive; and (4) trust the American people to understand and appreciate the reality that sexual energy does not always stay within the strict boundaries of social propriety, especially for the rich and famous.
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A Generational Shift of Power
Part of the shift in perspective that the Clinton-Lewinsky affair has crystallized is itself the consequence of the rapid shift in American sexual attitudes that has occurred over the past thirty years. Although people's sexual practices have not shifted as radically as their sexual beliefs, attitudes about sex among America's younger voters are radically different from the attitudes of those who are a generation older. This extreme generational break reflects the radical shift in sexual culture brought about by the widespread availability of cheap and reliable birth control, the rise of feminism and recognition of female sexual desire, and the resultant countercultural revolution of sexual expansion, exploration, and diversity that exploded through American society beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. The 1992 election of Bill Clinton, the first president of the Woodstock generation, signaled the beginning of a generational shift in political power that can only continue in the future, and that has far-reaching sexual and political implications.
Clinton was elected over an aging George Bush in 1992 in part because Clinton was sexy, because he embodied the exuberant worldview of postwar baby boomers that contrasts so dramatically with the cautious ethos of those who grew up under the joint shadows of the Great Depression and the Second World War. However apologetic Bill Clinton may be about specific sexual behaviors when it is politic for him to do so, he is nonetheless an unapologetically sexual man. The word is that he gives good hugs, gives good head, "talks pussy" regularly on the golf course and, for at least one period in his life, liked his women two at a time. For all his unresolved sexual guilt, Clinton truly seems to appreciate the primal power of sexual feeling and desire. At least up until the Lewinsky debacle, he was a man who openly embraced sex as a positive life force, one that makes life more lively, more livable, more interesting, more fulfilling, certainly more fun.
There is something about this aspect of Clinton's personality that helps explain why people like Kenneth Starr and Henry Hyde have been willing to risk destroying the Republican Party in the name of exorcising him from the White House. The generational clash that the country endured family by family during the 1970s is the same clash we has seen unfold on the national political stage through the impeachment campaign. As in the cultural wars of the 1970s, the sex-positive perspective of the younger generation has triumphed, leaving the older generation dazed, frightened, and confused. The moral and sexual absolutism that orators like Henry Hyde counted on to rally the American people to outrage simply does not carry much weight with Americans who have grown up in the post-Haight-Ashbury era of sexual openness and increasing acceptance of sexual expression and diversity. To younger Americans, sex is most fundamentally an emotional and practical issue, rather than a moral one.
As Republicans and Democrats continue to battle for control of the White House and of Congress, the future belongs to those who acknowledge and embrace the fact that the times really are changing, especially with regard to standards of sexual behavior and how those standards color the way we view political leaders of both parties and genders. At the moment, the Democrats (not entirely intentionally) have aligned themselves with sexual reality, while the Republicans are scrambling to free themselves of the lodestone of the Christian Right and catch up. The next chapter of the story won't be clear until after the elections in November, 2000. Whichever way that wind blows, the Clinton-Lewinsky phenomenon will be remembered as an important watershed in the evolving interplay between sex and politics.
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Sexuality and Culture, 1999
Copyright © 1999 David Steinberg
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